The present disclosure relates in general to the field of computers, and more particularly to Information Technology (IT) architecture framework. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to improving an architecture framework using a “bottom up” architecture improvement methodology.
An enterprise Information Technology (IT) architecture (“architecture”) is defined as a combination of hardware and software that is used to perform text, data, website, multimedia and other computer related processing for an enterprise. An enterprise IT architecture framework (“framework”) is defined as a model (i.e., a “blueprint”) of the enterprise IT architecture. Thus, the framework describes a high level view of the architecture, and the architecture describes components of an IT system in finer detail.
The interplay between an architecture and a framework (a.k.a., “architecture framework”) leads to problems when attempting to improve an existing IT system. That is, systems engineers typically choose between evaluating and improving either the architecture or the framework, but do not contemplate an interaction between the two.